Thursday, June 22, 2017

NYC Educator: At the Skinnies

The highlight of the educational season, of course, is the Class Size Matters Skinny Awards. Leonie Haimson organizes them and finds a whole lot of cool stuff happening in education. In fact, I won one year. People are always coming up to me and saying, "Hey, aren't you that guy who won the Skinny award?" I get all "Aw shucks," before coming around and saying, "Yeah, that's me."

The restaurant was okay, and we got a coupon for a free drink. However, they didn't have tap beer so Norm Scott and I ran down the block and found some. Norm picked up the tab, and I'm thankful, but three years ago we drank fourteen-dollar beers at the NY Hilton and I paid. I'm still waiting for someone to buy me a fourteen-dollar beer. But you can hardly find them anywhere.

This year there were multiple people and things that bore celebrating. First, of course, were the lawyers who gave their time to Class Size Matters. There were up and down stories, but I was very happy to hear of a victory against one of my least favorite humans, Andrew Cuomo. Though Cuomo claims to be a "student lobbyist," he lobbies for less money for schools that most need it. Wendy Lecker and David Sciarra put an end to that plan.

Another victory was rendering School Leadership Team meetings public, and that was led by Arthur Schwartz and Laura Barbieri. When this first happened, I wondered why it was so important. At my school, SLT meetings are not particularly eventful, and I always kind of thought if anyone wanted to NYC Educator: At the Skinnies: